Jerry Saltz - Art Is Life: Icons and Iconoclasts, Visionaries and Vigilantes, and Flashes of Hope in the Night

How to Be an Artist

Sketchbook with Voices (with Eric Fischl)

Seeing Out Louder

Seeing Out Loud

An Ideal Syllabus

The first time the power of art pulled the rug out from under me, I was nineteen years old.

It was the early 1970s. I was in Europe for the first time, on my way through Paris to Warsaw with my Polish girlfriend, on a bizarre quest to sell blue jeans behind the Iron Curtain. On that day, during my first pilgrimage to the Louvre, I laid eyes on a painting that seemed the sum of all things. It was a cosmographic perpetual motion machine, a purgatorial charnel houseas far from the warmth of any human sun as anything Id ever beheld. The moment I saw it, something like Krakatoa went off within me. That painting was Thodore Gricaults The Raft of the Medusa. Standing before it, I felt the gravitational field of my life shift forever.

The Raft of the Medusa is massive in scale, yet its subject matter is as simple as cows in a field, bathers by a river, or a birth in a manger. We see a large raft bearing a crowd of male figures, at the mercy of heaving seas. Their poses suggest a classical frieze, like Elgin marbles from hella collective ash heap of individually vivisected souls stripped bare of humanity. Each of the men is marked by a distinct, unforgettable gesture. Some are reckoning with their wounds; others seem to be coming to terms with death; some seem closer to damnation than to life. Every one of them appears hopeless. Our eyes are compelled by shafts of flickering phosphorescent light that rake at angles across the figures in the paintings foreground, tracing its dark pyramidal structure. Its a vision of jagged complexity and somehow also of profound grandeur.

That day, as I contemplated the Medusa, I felt the shattering heartbreak of a long-forgotten memory. My mind carried me back to a moment when I was ten years old, left by my mother to wander alone in the Art Institute of Chicago, scared and confused, until a small colorful diptych by Giovanni di Paolo beckoned to me from across a gallery. A portal opened.

A month later, my mother committed suicide. The portal slammed shut.

I never looked at art again. Until I did.

Every work of art tells a story: From hands on a cave wall to figures arrayed along a table for a Last Supper. From gleaners in a field to luncheons on the grass. From romping Greek gods to a Sunday in the park to the cutout silhouette of a white man beating a slave. As Marcel Proust wrote, Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The subject matter of Michelangelos David is a biblical tale told in marble. But the deep content of this five-hundred-year-old sculptureits aesthetic substructure, its crux and lifebloodincludes ideas about sensuality, beauty, majesty, pathos, the power of the self, the potentiality of movement, the inchoate softness of marble, even the awareness of recently rediscovered classical Roman statuary so radical that it almost gave Michelangelo a nervous breakdown. Goyas Saturn Devouring His Son, like Toni Morrisons The Bluest Eye, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyns One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Nina Simone singing Strange Fruit, or Francis Ford Coppolas Apocalypse Now, makes you experience alienation, rage, horror, revulsion, love, grace, ugliness, absurdity, hopelessness, bloodlust, bleakness, the memories of meetings and partings, nightmares, phantoms, cultural dysmorphia, shapeless inner shadows, the shattering collapse of moral order, and the decay of the soulall at the same time.

The painting I saw that day at the Louvre had its origins in a real-life story of the transatlantic slave trade. In June 1816, the French frigate Medusa and three other ships were dispatched to Senegal to reestablish operations and resume the trade, which had been interrupted by the Napoleonic Wars. The